From whey to petrol, but why?

The first commercial grade bioethanol-blended petrol in New Zealand was launched mid winter by Aussie-owned Gull New Zealand, the country’s smallest oil company, but critics of the government Biofuels Sales Obligation ask if it will achieve anything?

Gull's E10 (called Force 10) is a blend of 90 percent petrol and 10 percent bioethanol, a by-product of the dairy industry that is produced at Anchor Ethanol (a Fonterra subsidiary) from its Reporoa distillery using batch fermentation process.

The fuel is then blended at Gull’s Mount Manganui terminal.

Anchor Ethanol has been producing ethanol from whey, a by-product from the manufacturing of cheese and casein, for some 20 years. The process was discovered in Europe in the 1970s. Anchor Ethanol has two distilleries in New Zealand producing over 11 million litres of ethanol per annum. Two independent distilleries produce a further six million litres.

Currently, more than half of the product is exported and mostly used in the beverage industry.

Gull’s move was ahead of the Biofuels Sales Obligation that kicks in April 2008, requiring biofuels to make up 3.4 percent of fuel companies’ sales by the year 2012.

This biofuel target is not without its critics.  Susan Krumdiek, the director of the Advance Energy and Material Systems Laboratory at Canterbury University, says the Government is wasting it time by promoting biofuels in the hope of reducing carbon emissions. The process involved in turning materials such as whey into ethanol involves a lot of energy, including coal burning, she says. 

The source of the whey – the cows – also produce a lot of methane, a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and responsible for almost half of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, Krumdiek adds.

More recently, Harvey Weake, senior vice-president at Methanex Asia-Pacific, told delegates to the 2007 Gas Summit in

Wellington that more balance was needed in the biofuels versus fossil fuels debate.

“Biofuels are not a silver bullet for climate change,” he says, arguing for the benefits of some petroleum-derived fuels.

Global methanol demand is strong, he says, with the  petrochemical used in a variety of applications – from bio-diesel, methanol blends with petrol, the petrol octane enhancer MTBE and the synthetic LPG and diesel replacement fuel, dimethyl ether (DME). China and Japan are leading the way with the use of DME as a transport fuel, with China using methanol in a 15 percent blend with petrol, he says.

“If it’s good enough for China, why not New Zealand?”